“Poins! and be hanged; Poins!” the knight repeated.
“Peace, you fat-kidneyed rascal!” said the Prince of Wales, from a neighbouring hedge. “What a brawling dost thou keep!”
“Where’s Poins, Hal?”
“He is walked up to the top of the hill: I’ll go seek him.”
And the Prince walked up the hill in an airy and unconcerned manner, pretending to seek Poins. Herein is exemplified the habitual duplicity and dissimulation of this young prince’s character. He knew as well that Poins was close behind him, grinning in a hollow tree, as that in their own hearts (much hollower than the tree, by the way, only not nearly so big) they were gloating over a scheme of malice and treachery, of which their unsuspecting senior was to be the victim. “A plague on’t,” as that moralist himself observed, a few seconds afterwards, “when thieves cannot be true to one another!”
Sir John himself was the soul of honour among——men of his own order.
“If I travel but four foot by the square further afoot,
“said the knight, sitting on a fallen tree and chafing
“like a caged lion—still more like a stranded whale,
“I shall break my wind. Well, I doubt not but to die a
“fair death for all this, if I ‘scape hanging for killing that rogue. I have
“forsworn his company, hourly, any time these two-and-twenty years; *
“and yet I am bewitched with the rogue’s company. If the rascal have not
“given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged! it could not
“be else. I have drunk medicines. Poins! Hal! a plague upon you both!
“Bardolph! Peto! I’ll starve ere I’ll rob a foot further.”
* Either this is an illustration of the hereditary Falstaff
looseness as to dates and figures, or a proof of our hero’s
marvellous insight into human character. Accepting the
latter hypothesis, Sir John must have discovered Mr. Poins
to have been a dangerous acquaintance in embryo, before that
young gentleman had emerged from his cradle.
Sir John felt sick of rogues. In his wrath he even meditated the terrible vengeance of turning honest, and thus depriving his false-hearted comrades of the advantages of his counsels and alliance. But it had needed a more implacable nature than our hero’s to carry animosity to such a deadly pitch. Moreover, Sir John, for one, would not set the base example in the camp of sacrificing duty to private feeling. Besides, there was another weighty consideration—he was in want of money.
These and other reflections calmed our hero; so much so, that by the time Gadshill, their scout (evidently from his surname a native of Kent, son, perhaps grandson, of one of Jack’s deerstalking comrades in the days of yore; who knows?), arrived with tidings that there was money of the King’s coming down the hill and going to the King’s Exchequer, Sir John was himself again; forgetting fatigue, danger, and resentment, everything but that there was money of the King’s going to the King’s Exchequer.
“You lie, you rogue!” he said, “‘tis going to the King’s Tavern.”